hello
I'm running openbsd 4.3 on a macmini ppc g4
I need mlterm to have multilanguage support in terminal mode (I have no gui and will not have one). For some reason, the package is not compiled with uim support, so you need to install it from source to have it configured the way you need it. On my old notebook everything went fine, but here something seems to go wrong, and I cannot input chinese from terminal, and in the "mlconfig" window uim is not listed as a standalone input method, but only under XIM.
This is what I get with make, notice the warning at the end:

On my old notebook everything went fine, but here something seems to go wrong...

What version of OpenBSD are/were you running on your laptop, & which processor was involved? PPC or i386?

Quote:

This is what I get with make, notice the warning at the end:

Various questions:

You either installed the ports tree infrastructure, ports.tar.gz, from the CD set, ftp, or installed the tree itself via CVS. Are you sure that the tree installed matches OpenBSD 4.3? More information explaining strange errors can be found in Section 15.4.1 of the FAQ:

...For some reason, the package is not compiled with uim support, so you need to install it from source to have it configured the way you need it.

Are you using the port? Or are you skipping the port and using the sourceforge project's raw source?

Quote:

On my old notebook everything went fine, but here something seems to go wrong...

If this is the sourceforge code directly, rather than the port, I can see a host of problems -- including the requirement for devel/libtool. Libtool dependent applications must use the OpenBSD supplied libtool, rather than the variant included with applications.

If you have not started with the x11/mlterm port, you should. There are several key patches required for Makefiles, to support building the application correctly. In addition, the maintainer's name and e-mail address may be found in the Makefile, if you have specific questions about why one feature you seem to need was disabled.

Is there a way to configure a port with the features I need by my self?

Recognize that OpenBSD's ports tree is simply a standardized directory structure with Makefiles which upon execution will download source from an authenticated server following by doing whatever building & installing is necessary for the OpenBSD environment.

Within each application's directory structure is a patches directory will hold whatever diff's are required to both massage the code to run in OpenBSD's environment & adhere to OpenBSD's filesystem layout (see hier(7) for more information...). CVS indicates that this port has not been touched since February meaning that the code already vetted by the OpenBSD project may be older than the code found on SourceForge.

So to apply different changes will require an intimate knowledge of both the current port & whatever SourceForge provides. You will likely need to understand the patches that OpenBSD port maintainers created, & the entire process can be tedious depending upon how platform agnostic the original source base is & how extensive the changes are you need to make. Basically, you will be learning much of the knowledge the official port maintainers have.

As jggimi already mentioned, the Makefile for OpenBSD's mlterm port will contain the name & address of the maintainer. This can also be found at the following:

Be aware that all development work is performed against -current, and you are running 4.3. If your desired feature is added, the development work might required backporting in order to run with 4.3, or you may be required to move to -current to employ it.

instead of writing to the maintainer, I now took some time to try something different. I downloaded the previous version from sourceforge (2.9.3 instead of 2.9.4). What I find strange is that it works perfectly (and configures correctly with uim) only if I install it in my user folder, if I installit system-wide if I try to run it it gives this message:

Most everything found on SourceForge will be Linux-centric. Given that Linux has a different filesystem layout (as mentioned earlier in this thread...) & given that the libraries Linux applications use are not all available on OpenBSD, runtime errors as mentioned above are not surprising. You simply will need to comb through the code to determine what is missing & correct it yourself.

Because of the specific knowledge & details involved, we do not support porting efforts on this site. We stress that you contact the port maintainer as earlier discussed. Otherwise, you are on your own.

after a fresh install mlterm from source installed without problems, probably my system was corrupted. Also you seem to need to run "gmake" and not "make".
I actually did try to add a line in the Makefile of the ports to enable uim, but it still installed without it.
Anyway, now it works.
There's only one thing I cannot get to work, of which I posted some time ago in another thread, that is russian in put in mlterm. For some reason uxterm accepts russian input (xkb options in xorg.conf) but mlterm does not so I guess it is just a misconfiguration of mine or some keymap is missing, but I already don't know where to look for. I guess I've read all the possible man pages and tutorials and anything you can think about on the subject.
Anyone has had experience with mlterm?

recently I wrote to the mlterm mailing list, but also with no results (and if you see the mail archive is full of spam, and my request never got published). I might try to write again to the maintainer. I could also try to install freebsd on my noisy box and see if their port behaves differently.

To tell the truth, I feel quite stupid, because I could never figure out how to input chinese with uim-xim in uxterm, if I could I could probably forget about mlterm, although mlterm seems to be much smarter in handling geometry and formatting the output according to the window's size when there are different languages (is this called redrawing?).

...I could never figure out how to input chinese with uim-xim in uxterm...

I would also suggest sending a private message to scottro, one of this forum's members, as he has knowledge of various Japanese tools. Note that he appears to be quite busy, so you may not get a quick response.

I quite solved my problem switching to another terminal: roxterm. It handles well utf-8 and lets me type any language in the same terminal. The only bad thing is that it allows you to choose only one font. Seen that good chinese fonts usually are bad at displaying latin script and vice-versa, I had to create two different profiles that I need to switch when I need to see either latin or cyrillic letters on one side and chinese characters on the other displayed in a more readable way. Mltem on the other hand lets you specivy different fonts for "biwidth".
But no big deal now I'm quite happy with roxterm, it is in the packages, no building from source, it just works well.
I might come back to this mlterm story in the future, but kind of doubt it.
thank you all for helping out!